


Stolen Goods

by DrJekyl



Category: Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/F, Family Bonding, Family Fluff, Fluff, OT3, Other, Tooth-Rotting Fluff, little!liara
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-17
Updated: 2018-12-17
Packaged: 2019-09-21 04:47:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,834
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17036933
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DrJekyl/pseuds/DrJekyl
Summary: Benezia returns home early from a work trip and finds that Aethyta and Liara are up to minor mischief, with Shiala as their willing accomplice.





	Stolen Goods

**Author's Note:**

> [Trinity](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1080146) is the fic that started it all. Shiala’s presence in the relationship provides enough of a buffer for Aethyta & Benezia to navigate the really rough years, meaning they’re still bonded when Liara’s born, and Liara grows up with not one but two daddies.
> 
> Finally posting this to AO3 due to the tumblr apocalypse.

It took several seconds for the trio to notice her, engrossed, as they were, in their task.  One by one, however, they stopped, turned, looked up.  Liara was first, expression of unchecked enthusiasm crumbling into one of wide-eyed guilt.  Shiala was second, close on her heels, lowering the overly frilly pillow clasped in one hand while her eyes widened and cheeks darkened with sudden embarrassment.  Aethyta was last, courtesy of a sharp nudge to the ribs from Shiala.  She was, unsurprisingly, more startled by Benezia’s sudden appearance than repentant at the mess.

“Babe!” she said with transparent good cheer.  “You’re back early..?”

“The weather turned more quickly than predicted,” Benezia said, moving over to the dresser to divest herself of her gloves and her heavier items of jewelry.  “Once the festival moved indoors I could see little point to staying another night.”

At least, there seemed little point in staying compared to the prospect of returning home early to be with those she loved.  It seemed every day that passed took her further away from home and for longer, the four of them split between two or three locations more often than not.  Liara was growing quickly; Benezia would miss no more than she had to, not when the price of a few more hours with her was small in the grand scheme of things.  A handful of little lies, a change of flight and a few more hours of missed sleep than intended, and she was here.  Home.

Her eyes, through the mirror, fell to her daughter, who looked all the world as though she’d just been caught committing some heinous crime, not assisting in the construction of what, on closer examination, appeared to be some kind of a blanket fortress.  It was a mess, certainly, thrown together from most of their bedroom’s linens and pillows and furniture -including, Benezia noted, her antique B’Toin armoire, as weighty as it was pricey- but there was a kind of order to it.  Enough space beneath its canopy for a child and two adults, if they squeezed.  Storybooks, physical paper and coloured pencils, a selection of snacks and Aethyta’s battered kepesh-yakshi set heaped on the floor nearby suggested plans for the night once the construction was completed.

The sudden pang in her heart was at once familiar and alien, as unwelcome as it was ludicrous.  They’d not expected her to be home tonight.  It only made sense for them to arrange something to keep Liara occupied for the evening.  Awkwardly both too young and too old to travel, Liara was still of an age to miss her mother during even brief absences unless an entertaining distraction could be found.  It was practical, logical.  And yet...

_‘Don’t tell your mother’._

That was the crux of it, those four words.  Benezia was not the ‘fun’ parent.  That honour went, quite deservedly, to Aethyta, whose capacity for mischief had (to Benezia’s private astonishment that such a thing was possible) only grown as their daughter had.  Shiala, meanwhile, typically served as their often willing, sometimes unwitting accomplice. It always seemed to fall to Benezia to set boundaries, impose limits, enforce bedtimes, and generally to spend much of the limited time they had together as a teacher, not playmate.  They were needful things, what she taught, but rarely as appealing to a child as a tree to climb or a hole to dig, a gym to explore or pastry to steal.

Even so, it pained her it pained her to think Liara -that all  _three_  of them- thought her more likely to admonish than participate.

"Well, carry on!” she said brightly, over her shoulder and after several beats too long.  "You should take the cushions from the couches in the study if you haven’t already.  And there may be some more blankets in the wardrobe.“

She turned and made for said wardrobe at that point, to shed her jacket and suit and underthings in favour of something more comfortable to spend the evening in.  She could read, perhaps, or log in and debate, or simply catch up on lost sleep, and leave them to their fun, content in simply being nearby.

Aethyta’s voice drifted in from the bedroom, only slightly muffled by the racks of clothing.

"I reckon if we grab those cushions from the study like your mom said, we can make this thing big enough for four.  Whadaya think, whelp?”

Benezia smiled and shook her head at herself.  Of course, if it was unfair of them to assume that she would admonish them for their fun, it was equally unfair of her to assume that they’d not welcome her participation.  The sound of running feet indicated that Aethyta’s suggestion was met with resounding approval.  More footsteps approached the wardrobe, and then Shiala was there, hangar in hand to take her blouse and then jacket as she shrugged free of both.  Shiala’s other hand went to the small of her back, now bare, a touch so light it was barely there.

“I still wish you’d let one of us come with you,” Shiala said.

Benezia sighed and turned to face the matron, raising a hand of her own to Shiala’s cheek.

“We discussed this.  Either we trust Musa to stand in your place, with all that entails, or we don’t.  And if we don’t-”

A faint frown creased Shiala’s brow.  It was rare day indeed that Benezia won an argument regarding her security arrangements with Shiala or Aethyta, let alone both.  On this matter, however, she had been resolute and swayed both of them with hard, if simple, logic.  Musahir had been a member of the household guard for the better part of a century, and Shiala’s second for most of it.  Her skills were exceptional, her loyalty without question; she deserved to have her service repaid with trust, the opportunity to develop herself further.  

“I know.  She’s too good to waste guarding the estate, or only ever being my second” Shiala conceded, her features softening.  “Still, I’m glad to have you back safely.”

Benezia smiled and drew the matron in claim the kiss she was rightfully due, savouring the feel, the taste of her.  When they parted, she titled her head down so their foreheads remained touching, and she could look directly into Shiala’s bright green eyes.

“I’m always happy to be home, with those I love,” she said and meant it, well-pleased by Shiala’s answering smile.

Benezia broke the moment and their embrace by straightening, seizing the opportunity to stretch, loosening her shoulders and back.  No matter how often she traveled, it seemed Benezia would never master the art of finding a comfortable position to relax in on long skycar trips.  From the overhead stretch, it took little further effort to reach up to one of the higher shelves and pull down an assortment of additional blankets.  

In theory, they were there for emergencies.  In practice, they found far more use on wintry nights and fits of fancy of the sort that led to open windows and snuggling in the cold.

“Here,” she said, passing them down to Shiala.  "I’ll finish changing and see if I can find any more.“

Shiala nodded and vanished back out into the main room with her burden, leaving Benezia to rummage amongst her shelves for something more suitable for an evening in.  Leggings, perhaps, and sweater?  Ah, yes - her questing fingers found just the one, and drew it forth from its hiding place behind several of her hat boxes.  The Soarstrike’s 2065 championship sweater.  It was overlarge, perhaps, and very cheaply made to boot, but it was also incredibly soft and warm, and perfect for lounging around on the floor.

More importantly, she’d stolen it from Aethyta some years before, and wasn’t above flaunting her successful thievery to her bondmate’s face.

As if summoned by her thoughts, heavier footsteps behind Benezia announced Aethyta’s approach.  She pretended not to notice in favour of pulling the sweater on over her head, and then feigned surprise when a pair of strong arms wrapped themselves around her waist.  Warm lips quickly kissed their way up her neck, to her jawline, nearly all the way up to her crests.  A sigh escaped her on reflex, tension she hadn’t been aware she was carrying melting from her body as she let herself lean back against her bondmate’s embrace.

"Miss me?” Aethyta asked.

Just as she had with Shiala, she turned and caressed her bondmate’s cheek before claiming the kiss she was due.  Aethyta, though, was never satisfied with just one kiss and was unabashed about pressing her own claims.  

Quite unabashed.

“Always,” Benezia breathed when they finally parted, and matched Aethyta’s grin with a smile of her own.

“Good trip?  Everything go alright?”

“As well as could be expected, given the weather.  I think I’ve won some more converts. And... Dunitina agreed to support the reparations bill.  Only minor amendments.”

She hoped her hesitation before the last sentence wasn’t noticed.  Politics were something of a delicate topic between them at the moment, for all that a shared vision for their people had been one of the things that had first drawn them together.  But details mattered, appearances mattered, _approach_ mattered.  Aethyta’s unabashed militancy and personal competitiveness had caused more problems than her brilliance and unique perspective solved, and Benezia had grown so very tired of running interference.  And then, on top of everything else, there was suddenly a daughter to consider.  A daughter of asari parentage.

The arguments had shaken the house for months, and driven poor Shiala to distraction, alternating between long hours in the gym and more trying to provide what buffer between them that she could.  In the end, something had to give, and a compromise had to be found, and that had meant Aethyta, not just sacrificing any hope she had of reaching prominence on her own, but fading into silence on many a topic altogether.  They would still share a vision for the future, but advancing Benezia’s undeniably more successful career and public following would take priority.

Benezia had made sacrifices herself, in the interests of maintaining their bond, but she was also painfully aware that they were much smaller in comparison.

Aethyta, of course, had noticed her hesitation and met it with a nonchalance that was, to Benezia’s expert eye, somewhat forced.

“That’s a surprise. Figured she woulda wanted  _some_  kind of major sweetener.  What’s she up to?”

“I’m not sure.  I’d like to go over it tomorrow with you in more depth.”

“Sure, my day’s pretty clear.”

Aethyta broke their embrace and took a step back to examine Benezia critically.

“Isn’t that my sweater?”

A topic change.  

They’d both been making a concerted effort to draw out the points of tension between them, shining the light upon them for healing rather than letting them fester.  Forcing a topic change, or retreating to humour, were two of Aethyta’s preferred ways of avoiding a difficult conversation.  But she was right to do so tonight: it was not a night for unearthing problems, or even discussing politics.  It could wait.  Would wait, at least until tomorrow.

“I think,” Benezia said archly, starting for the door, “you’ll find it’s mine now.”

Aethyta rolled her eyes, but followed her out into the bedroom proper.

“I’ll have you know I spent hours looking for that sweater when they reached the quarterfinals last year.  Shoulda known you’d stolen it.  Anyway, since when have you followed the Soarstrikes? You’re an Armali girl.”

“‘Arsenal, always’ ,” Benezia said, quoting the club’s unofficial motto and throwing a wink back over her shoulder.  “Though last year was a good one for the Soarstrikes.”

“A very good one,” Shiala added as they approached.  She looked Benezia up and down once, quickly, and turned her attention on Aethyta, voice wry.   "But if we’re talking about missing clothing, I’m pretty sure she has my Beltway shirt.  It was a limited edition too.“

"Such accusations wound me,” Benezia declared, hand over her heart.  "Especially when you can’t prove anything.“

Shiala’s expression made it clear that she didn’t believe Benezia’s admittedly underwhelming protestations of innocence.  Aethyta’s snort of disbelief was equally illuminating.

"I wonder what else we’d find if we went through your wardrobe?” Aethyta mused.  "Properly.  Top to bottom.”

“I wonder too,” Shiala said.  “I’m pretty sure I had more than one leather jacket, once.  One of them had a yellow stripe on the sleeve.“

"I couldn’t say, I’m sure,” said Benezia, who may have had just such a jacket stashed away in the back of her wardrobe, old and ill-fitting.

Liara’s re-entrance proved to be a welcome distraction from further accusations, their daughter attempting to drag several large and unsteadily piled couch cushions through the study door. Aethyta ambled over to help.

“I hope you’re ok with your mom being a keptomaniac kid,” she told Liara seriously.

Liara frowned up at her father, the adorably scrunched up little nose completing the thinking expression she adopted whenever encountering a new concept or word.

“What’s a klep- Kepto-?”

“Klep-to-ma—i-anc,” Aethyta repeated, stressing the individual syllables.  She grabbed the top two cushions and lobbed one at Shiala, who caught it easily.

“Klepotmaniac?”

“Someone who takes things that don’t belong to them.”  She shot Benezia a meaningful glance.  “A lot.”

“But... that would be stealing!" Liara said with mounting horror.  She looked over and up at Benezia for reassurance.  "Mother wouldn’t steal!”

“Of course I wouldn’t,” Benezia assured her. “I simply borrowed your father’s sweater and she’s upset that it suits me better.”

“Everything looks better on you,” Aethyta said, and lobbed the next cushion Benezia’s way, with perhaps a bit more force than she had the first.  Benezia caught it, though perhaps not as gracefully as Shiala had.

“Then my point is made,” she said, aware of Liara’s eyes upon her.  “Now, how can I help?”

The construction, when completed, was a very tight squeeze for three adults and one hyperactive child, but not uncomfortably so.  Benezia quickly found herself ensconced in one corner, legs folded beneath her, the top of her head grazing the fort’s blanket roof.  Liara sat rather more easily between her and Aethyta, Shiala to Benezia's other side.

Benezia lost at kepesh-yakshi three times over, to the point where Liara demanded and was given a better teammate. When she tired of that game, they moved onto  _truth or lie_ , which Benezia won handily and to her great personal amusement. Asking to Shiala to convincingly lie, even to a child, brought to mind metaphors involving blood and stones and similar, and it seemed that Liara had well and truly clued into her father’s tendency to ‘overstate’ the truth, and presumed she was lying as a matter of course.  A drawing game followed, Benezia paired with Shiala against the other two, and fought to a protracted and somewhat argumentative draw.  Then a board game, a simple thing with dice and cards that drew on rather more luck than skill, and it took just a little bluffing and distraction for the three adults to engineer Liara's victory.

Towards the end of that one, though, the late hour began to win past the rather prodigious amount of sweets Liara had managed to eat, and the three adults made a silent agreement to let things start to wind down.  They re-directed Liara’s attention to her paper and pencils, Shiala and Aethyta breaking out the Kepesh-yakshi set again for a quiet but rather intense game.  Benezia took the opportunity to quickly check her mail and dash off a few replies to the most urgent, and then do a quick skim of the major news and debate feeds.  That done, she elected to amuse herself by dashing out a few sketches of the three of them on her omni. Aethyta and Shiala hunched over the board, brows furrowed and lost in the game. Liara, on her belly, head propped on one hand, drawing something that evidently required considerable amount of both focus and the colour brown but that was not, to Benezia’s eye at least, of readily discernible nature.

She really was unusually focused for a child her age, her Liara.  Even if the evidence hadn’t been there for Benezia’s own eyes to see, her tutors of various stripes had all commented upon it more than once: once engaged in a topic or task, little would dissuade Liara from exploring it to exhaustion, or completing it to perfection.  Neither Benezia nor Aethyta nor Shiala were certain if it was a product of growing up underfoot of adults in a busy and rather philosophical matriarchal household, or a side-effect of Liara’s startling and sometimes frankly worrisome intellectual gifts.

It was likely some combination of both, in truth.  Liara tested better than Benezia had at her age in virtually every area but social development, the one area where Liara noticeably lagged behind her peers rather than led.  That, again, was likely attributable to both nature and nurture; Benezia had dim memories of sometimes finding other children easily distracted and frustratingly slow to grasp new ideas, and she had not grown up with her dinners full of more debate than food.

As if sensing she was under scrutiny, Liara looked up, her eyes big, guileless and sleepy, and Benezia’s arms suddenly felt empty without her in them.  Well, given that she was home for the night, she could complete their nightly ritual in person, rather than via vidlink.

“Do you want a story tonight?” she asked softly, and was instantly rewarded by a bright, beaming smile, and then a small, squirming body doing its best to fit into a lap now somewhat too small for it, complete with an elbow to her side for her trouble.  She caught the amused look that passed between her bondmate and their lover as they paused in their game, but elected to ignore both it and them for the time being.

Benezia cheated somewhat, bringing a book up on her omni rather than going from memory, and her voice, to her own ear, held an undernote of rasp, and wasn’t quite as capable of hitting the different notes of different voices as she was used to. But the truth of the matter was that she had come straight from the festival and was running on perilously little sleep.  In all likelihood, she was more tired than Liara herself, who was outright yawning into Benezia’s shoulder by the time she reached the last page.

“I’m glad the huntress won,” Liara confided sleepily.  “‘would’ve seemed wrong if she didn’t.”

Benezia hummed noncommittally and closed the omni display, not quite prepared to get into alternative interpretations of the story tonight.

“I’m glad you’re home too, mama,” Liara added, snuggling her brow a little deeper into Benezia’s shoulder.  “I missed you.”

"I missed you too, dear heart.  It’s why I came home early.”

“I wish you didn’t have to go at all.”

“I know,” Benezia said, finding herself uncharacteristically lost for other words.

“Can I come with you next time?”

“You could,” she conceded, “but I suspect you’d be bored.”

“No I wouldn’t!”

“I don’t get to do fun things when I go away for work, Little Wing.  Not things you’d find fun.  Much of it is talking to other people.”  She paused meaningfully, just long enough to see her daughter’s counter-argument start to form and preempt it . “And the parts that aren’t talking to other people are usually listening to other people.”

Liara’s face scrunched up in a scowl of such ferocity that Benezia couldn’t help but laugh, which, of course, only made the scowl intensify.  It faded, though, when Benezia didn’t add anything further, and soon Liara seemed to have set the idea aside in favour of rolling the fabric of Benezia’s sweater between her fingers.

“Mother?”

Oh, she could see where this one was going.  

“Yes, Liara?”

"Did you really borrow this from dad?”

Out of the corner of her eye, Benezia could see Aethyta and Shiala both very carefully not paying any attention to what she and Liara were talking about.  So carefully, in fact, that play seemed to have temporarily stopped.

“Can you keep a secret?” Benezia asked, tilting her head towards the pair of bad actors.  Liara’s eyes went wide, but she was quick to nod the affirmative, so Benezia ducked her head towards her ear, dropping her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “I stole it from her.  I took one of Shiala’s jackets as well.”

Liara’s expression of surprise was almost as comical as her earlier scowl had been.

“But, Mother!” she exclaimed, then remembered her promise, voice dropping back to a whisper that was no less surprised nor horrified, “ _Stealing_ is _wrong_!”

“Is it?  Well, I suppose it  _is_ ,” Benezia said, trying her hardest not to laugh again when Liara looked up at her as if the very stars had been shaken from her sky.

“But... but...  _why_?!”

“The same reason I keep some of your baby things, I suppose,” she said after a moment’s reflection, affecting a stage whisper.  “And that's the same reason that your father has a shawl of mine hidden away that she thinks I don’t know about.  I want something that reminds me of you, and of them, just as they were at that point in time.  I'm pretty certain Shiala has one of my old anklets too, come to think of it.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Liara said slowly.

“Perhaps not,” Benezia replied.  Again, out of the corner of her eye, she could see the other two paying furious attention to their game, with no outward appearance of surprise or guilt, no, none at all, especially not from Shiala who was such a  _wonderful_  actor at the best of times.  “But then love, in my experience, rarely makes complete sense.”

“Is this one of those things I’ll understand when I’m older?”  A pout, but not a severe one.

“Well, I don’t understand it fully myself, Little Wing” Benezia admitted, fighting a losing battle with a yawn of her own, letting her body slouch and settle a little more comfortably against the back of the armoire.  “So I can hardly guarantee you will.”

She couldn’t say for certain which of the two of them had fallen asleep first after that, only that she was the one gently shaken awake at some uncertain time later.  Shiala carefully extracted the sleeping child from her embrace, carrying her off to bed while Aethyta packed down enough of the fort to help Benezia up to her feet and guide her, groggy and slightly unsteady, over and into their own bed.

“You can keep the sweater,” Aethyta murmured, pulling her close.

“I always intended to,” she replied around another yawn.  “And you should find another hiding spot for my scarf.”

“You say that like I don’t already have one,” Aethyta chuckled, and kissed her brow.  And that was the moment Benezia took with her when she drifted back off to sleep, seconds later.


End file.
